The Los Angeles Rams’ offense, designed by head coach Sean McVay, is not a complicated one but it is an incredibly difficult scheme to stop. The roots of McVay’s offensive concepts go back to Bill Walsh and Mike Shanahan, but the structure of the offense goes back even further, to the days of Tubby Nelson and the Wing-T.
In the Wing-T and other offenses of its day, the offense would have 4 or 5 plays, each built off of the others, designed to take advantage of whatever the defense was doing to try to stop them. If the defense was overplaying to the outside, to stop the Buck Sweep, the offense would run Power, and if the defense was fast flowing to the play side to stop Power or Buck Sweep, the offense would run counter. This series based offensive approach puts defenses in position to be wrong, no matter how they play.
McVay, like Shanahan before him, has built his old-school offense around the Wide Zone running play, with play-action concepts built off of it. But he has added elements of spread teams, and college offenses in order to create an attack that is simple to execute yet difficult to stop.
The bread-and-butter play for the Rams, as mentioned, is wide zone. On wide zone the offensive line sets up a series of combination blocks, utilizing double teams to secure the defensive line at the first level, before one member of each double team breaks off to block a linebacker or defensive back at the second level of the defense.
The running back then makes a defined read, starting with the furthest outside defender on the line of scrimmage, to tell him whether to “bounce” the ball to the outside, “bend” it back inside, or “bang” it right down the middle.
Even without any window dressing this is a difficult play to stop, and has been the base run of many dominant offenses the last 30 years. But McVay gives the defense a lot more to worry about. He utilizes compressed formations, where the wide receivers have reduced splits away from the offensive line, as well as jet motion on a majority of the offense’s snaps from under center.
The compressed formations create college-style wide and short sides on the field, creating space to the outside that isn’t normally there on the NFL field. Additionally, these splits shorten the amount of distance his wide receivers have to cover in order to help block linebackers or safeties, which accomplishes a goal that every running game holds, make corners tackle.
On the below play, McVay combines these advantages of compressed formations, with the misdirection and indecision created by using Jet Motion to window dress what is really just a very simple wide zone run.
When Gurley cuts back, he’s left one-on-one with the backside corner and even though he isn’t able to break the tackle, because its a corner rather than a linebacker or defensive lineman he is able to get a solid 6-yard gain on first down.
The backside player doesn’t account for the jet action from the wide receiver, and doesn’t hesitate to make sure he maintains contain, so McVay knows that based on the way the defenders are playing, he should be able to have success on the jet sweep.
On this play, the right side of the Rams offense is executing the Wide Zone to that side, while the back side subtly executes the jet sweep, and wide receiver Josh Reynolds is able to run free for a twelve yard gain mostly untouched.
In addition to using the jet sweep off of wide zone, McVay loves to create opportunities in the passing game built off of wide zone.
On the below play, the Rams are using split flow on wide zone play action, with boot action from quarterback Jared Goff, the three level passing concept on this play is the most common boot combination at all levels of football.
Goff takes the easy completion for the 15-yard gain here on the over-route.
These are just a few examples of how the Rams can make defenders heads spin, and for three years they have created explosive plays with high regularity.
If the Cowboys are going to beat Los Angeles on Sunday, they are going to have to sort out all of this organized chaos, and lock down the Rams offense.
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